BiB093: Declare A K8s Stack With Spectro Cloud

The following is a transcript of the audio you can hear in the player.
Welcome to Briefings in Brief from the Packet Pushers. I am Ethan Banks, and I had a briefing on April 6, 2020 with a startup called Spectro Cloud. Spectro Cloud recently emerged from stealth mode and announced a $7.5 million dollar seed funding round from Sierra Ventures to get them on their way.
Who Is Spectro Cloud?
In a nutshell, Spectro Cloud is Kubernetes management. But…that’s really oversimplifying it, especially with the hundreds of offerings out there that have something to with Kubernetes management or Kubernetes as a service.
If I’m being more precise, Spectro Cloud is about managing an entire infrastructure stack that’s built around Kubernetes.
What Does Spectro Cloud Do?
With Spectro Cloud, you define a Kubernetes cluster profile. That profile will describe an OS and version, K8s version, storage, networking, and more. Some intelligence will advise you against silly pairings, although ultimately you can do whatever you like.
A Spectro Cloud cluster profile acts as a declarative document, describing how the Kubernetes cluster should be configured. How is that profile brought to life? Via Spectro Cloud’s Pallet Orchestrator. The Pallet Orchestrator monitors the cluster, compares it to the intended cluster profile, and makes certain the cluster is operating as the cluster profile declares that it should be.
If that operating model sounds familiar, it should, because that’s how Kubernetes itself operates. The K8s scheduler is constantly comparing YAML definition files to the running state of the cluster and making sure actual state reflects intended state.
But rather than having to fuss with YAML files, Spectro Cloud gives you a nice UI you can build out your cluster profiles with. Maybe you want several different profiles, depending on the Kubernetes use case. Could be that for dev, you define storage of OpenEBS 1.5, networking with Calico 3.9, K8s 1.18, running on CentOS 7.6. But then for prod, you add monitoring via Prometheus, security with Twistlock, and running on RHEL.
You get the idea. You don’t have to manually build out a complex stack. Let Spectro Cloud do it for you. Devs don’t have to think much about it, as operators can stand up a cluster with defined properties quickly.
Spectro Cloud is more than just an initial deployment tool, though. You can perform upgrades to production as well. Update your cluster profile, set your maintenance policy to control how the upgrade is to be performed, and off you go.
Okay, But Why Spectro Cloud?
If you’ve gotten this far, maybe this sounds nice, but you’re wondering…why? With all the KaaS offerings in the world, why Spectro Cloud?
I’ll give you two reasons.

* You need more control over your K8s environment than a packaged K8s distro allows you to have. With a K8s distro, you get what you get. If that works for you, great, but you can’t color outside the lines. On the other hand, you don’t want to have to roll your own Kubernetes artisanally by hand, because that’s tedious, boring, error-prone, and adds zero business value. Spectro Cloud is taking away the boring stuff while letting you build the sort of cluster you specifically require.
* Spectro Cloud has a long-term vision of multicloud and multicluster mesh. I think this is a big deal, as K8s federation is not a solved problem yet. But, it’s a problem that needs solving if Kubernetes becomes the ubiquitous platform all applications run on top of. In other words, Spectro Cloud is just getting started. Their long-term plans are to makes Kubernetes management easy, no matter what scale your cluster environment might grow to.

For More Information
My thanks to Tenry Fu, Co-founder and CEO,